Over the course of her career, Jo Fairley’s commitment to combining her passion for people and environment with her extraordinary entrepreneurial instinct has changed the confectionery industry.
Jo’s strong values were cemented at a young age watching Blue Peter where she says she learnt to be kind and think about other people. When at 13 she was given a book called A Shopper’s Guide to Saving the Planet she started taking empty bottles to the bottle bank and putting bricks inside the school toilet cisterns to reduce water waste. The latter project was cut short after she was caught standing on the toilet seat, brick in hand, and was accused of attempted vandalism.
Her passion and drive were also forged during her school years. Jo recalled a careers teacher who told her: “Jo Fairley, if you ever make so much as a Girl Friday, I’ll eat my hat.”
She says: “What that did was ignite rocket fuel under my chair with the determination to prove her wrong. And I did.”
A series of firsts
She left school at 16 with six O-levels and by 23 was the UK’s youngest magazine editor on record. In 1991 she married then Soil Association treasurer and Whole Earth Foods co-founder Craig Sams. “I obviously married him for his peanut butter,” jokes Jo.
A self-confessed chocoholic, Jo tells the story of finding two squares of dark chocolate on her husband’s desk – the “darkest, yummiest, most delicious chocolate I’d ever eaten.”
This was a sample of the world’s first organic chocolate. Craig was uninterested as his Whole Earth brand was founded on the principles of no added sugar, but she says: “chocolate nagged at me and I nagged at him”. Eventually the suggestion was made that Jo start this business herself.
Inspired by pioneering businesswoman and friend Dame Anita Roddick, Jo decided to move forward with the goal of “doing good through doing business”. In the case of Green & Black’s this meant by “changing the world one square of chocolate at a time”.
In 1994, Green & Black’s launched the Maya Gold bar – the first Fairtrade-certified product in the UK.
The impact of Jo’s work
As an ex-journalist, Jo has a passion for storytelling. She recalls the day she realised, during a chocolate tasting, that there was a blank canvas on the inside of the chocolate wrappers. After that, Green & Black’s began sharing the stories of the farmers and their families. Over the years, the chocolate company has helped make a huge difference to these communities worldwide.
In Belize, when Jo and her husband first started working with the Maya, “there was no secondary education for children in the cocoa-growing villages. Now 90% of those kids go on to secondary school, business school, and university, and they bring those skills back to those villages. That helps the whole community travel further and faster along that path out of poverty.”
She also talks about the impact Green & Black’s has had on other brands, including giants like Cadbury. These impacts have continued to spread up and out. Cadbury’s parent company, Mondelez, runs a $1bn programme called Cocoa Life that works to improve farmer livelihood and support cocoa-growing communities. Jo’s favourite part of this project is that you can’t be part of Cocoa Life if women are not financially empowered in the community.
Women supporting women
Jo speaks about how lucky she is to have been surrounded by other women who have supported her and introduced her to new opportunities. She is also aware that many are not so lucky. Having spoken about her school experience on Desert Island Discs, she discovered seven other women who had been spoken down to by the same female career’s teacher. Four had responded the way Jo herself had, using the experience to fuel them, but three wrote to Jo to say that they had “lowered their sights as a result”. They felt “their life had turned out different as a result.”
“The power of words that we use towards other women is so strong, and we have to use it wisely. I hoped that we weren’t going to have International Women’s Day anymore. But with the landscape of the world at the moment, I think we need it more than ever.”
The theme for this year’s event was “Give to Gain”, a reminder that when we invest in women, with time and encouragement, everyone benefits and opportunities expand. The event was an excellent example of this, with women of all ages coming together to learn from each other’s experiences and create and strengthen relationships. It was also supported by a new Weatherbys guide, Spotlight for Women in Relationships and Finance, which highlights the importance of women’s engagement in finances.